Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
What Can REF Teach Us About Impact?
Discussions around the REF have tended to be negative, but what exactly is viewed poorly varies by interest group[. Two academics who conducted an analysis of the media’s covefage of the framework argue there is much that can be learned for future assessment exercises and it is ever-more important that we get it right when thinking about ‘impact’ in research and the pressures academics face.
Help ESRC Find the 50 Biggest Social Science Achievements
In honor of its 50th anniversary next year, Britain’s social science research council wants you to help it identify 50 signal achievements made possible by social science.
A Pioneering Behavioral Science Think Tank at the Crossroads
Social Science Space talks to Margaret Levi about her goals for re-imagining the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
Proof Over Promise: Finding An Impact Factor for Your Career
Publishing in a high-impact journal carries the implicit promise that somehow an individual article also will be highly cited. But the proof of this logic remains unsubstantiated. How about measuring career impact more than journal impact? The authors offer one option they’ve developed.
What Do Academia’s Ubiquitous Rankings Accomplish?
Why does it matter whether you study or work at the sociology department that comes first, 12th or 89th in a ranking? Why does it matter whether the journal you publish in is included and ranked in a certain index, or not? Let us know your thoughts.
Who Takes Humanities Courses? A Lot of Social Scientists
Parsing federal education statistics, it turns out that prospective social scientists are the most avid consumers of humanities courses as undergrads (not counting humanities majors themselves, that is).
National Science Board: Defining the Case for Social Science
UPDATING: A presentation on social, behavioral and economic sciences funded by the National Science Foundation pressed one overriding message: we matter.
Should Self-Citation Count?
There has been much discussion over how useful citation metrics, like Google Scholar’s H-index, really are and to what extent they can be gamed. Specifically there appears to be concern over the practice of self-citation as it varies widely between disciplines. So what should academics make of self-citations? Referring back to our Handbook on Maximising the Impact of Your Research, the Public Policy Group assess the key issues and advise that self-citations by researchers and teams are a perfectly legitimate and relevant aspect of disciplinary practice. But individuals should take care to ensure their own self-citation rate is not above the average for their particular discipline.
